While most retailers—about 77%—expect long-term gasoline demand to show slight or strong growth, many (43%) believe electric vehicles (EVs) will have the harshest effect on future gasoline demand.
For Mark Jordan, president and CEO at Mount Pleasant, S.C.-based Refuel Operating Co. LLC, the switch to EV is still a long way out. Eventually, EVs will have a large effect on fuel demand, though, he says.
“But with the average age of a car on the road at 11 or 12 years old, I don’t think it’s going to be sudden. I think that that will be slow,” Jordan says.
Slow or not, Jordan is preparing for an eventual shift at Refuel. Jordan says the company is considering which of its 113 locations would make the most sense to add an EV charging station. That could be a current store or a future build, he says.
“We’re putting in some infrastructure now if it’s a new build to make sure that we don’t have to tear up parking lots later on,” Jordan says.
“And we’re listening to and reading everything about EV that we can find.”
He’s not the only one with EV plans. Forty-three percent of survey respondents said they plan to add an EV station to their fuel offering in 2021.
Blackie Wills, president and COO of La Plata, Md.-based The Wills Group/Dash In, also thinks an EV transition is coming slowly but surely.
“It’s anyone’s guess as to how quickly this moves,” he says. “Do I think there’s going to be significant changes in the next five years? No. I think probably 10 years is about that tipping point where we could go from 2% per year to maybe more like 4% or 5% per year declines [in gasoline demand.]”
Dash In is adding its first EV chargers at a new build in Richmond, Va., set to open in 2022. Wills has been reluctant to go all in on EVs because he’s not sure how much of a commercial application there is for Dash In’s business, especially for their stores in more rural areas not near a highway.
“I tend to think people are going to charge at home and at work. And there may be destinations where they’ll charge too, like the grocery store or the shopping mall, … but I’m just not convinced that there’s a real, huge opportunity for our industry just yet outside of that interstate location situation,” Wills says.
Another change retailers are facing is the switch to EMV-compliant gas pumps. Major credit-card companies can hold gas stations liable for fraudulent purchases, chargebacks and other counterfeit transactions if they have not converted to accept chip-card payments at each pump and payment point.
Most retailers—nearly 99%—had already upgraded or are in the process of upgrading pumps to be EMV chip card compliant, according to survey results. The top reasons for upgrading were to introduce new payment technologies (26.6%), introduce new pump features (20.9%) and to avoid liability risks (18.3%).